The Old Ball Game (2 page)

Out went the call to bring in the “phenom” from the bull pen. Several reporters noted that Mathewson showed some speed, but alas, nothing else. In his first full inning, he gave up five runs. Altogether, in a bit more than three innings pitched, he hit three batters, threw a wild pitch, and allowed four hits while watching his woebegone teammates “go up in the air,” butchering various routine chances.

The latter was, however, standard procedure for the Giants. Of special note was the third baseman, “Piano Legs” Charley
Hickman, who set a season's record for errors at the hot corner— ninety-one—a mark in ignominy that survives to this day. But then, the New-Yorks were an all-around terrible team, a “baseball menagerie,” in last place with a 23-43 record. Newspapers seemed to all but keep in type such headlines as:
NEW-YORKS BEATEN AS USUAL
and
SECOND CLASS BASEBALL IN HARLEM
. Indeed, Mathewson had been given a choice by the Norfolk owner—who also had offers from Philadelphia and Cincinnati for his young star—and Matty had chosen New York precisely because the Giants were so weak. Indeed, so dreadful was the team that few observers could bring themselves to call such diamond pygmies Giants. More often they were referred to as the “Harlemites,” in recognition of their locale, or the “Tammany Hall team” in honor of their owner, Andrew Freedman, who was an important operative in that corrupt machine. Thus, while Mathewson had correctly concluded that his chances to play would be better in New York, the Harlemites were far worse and more star-crossed than he could possibly have bargained for.

Mathewson joined them in New York after the Giants' return from a particularly disastrous western road trip. In St. Louis, one stalwart, first baseman “Dirty Jack” Doyle, had even been arrested for assaulting the umpire while the “fair-minded spectators yelled 'Shame!'” The Giants were so riven with dissent that as soon as the team staggered back to New York, the manager, Buck Ewing, tendered his resignation. Freedman, the owner, thereupon chose as Ewing's successor George Davis, the very player who led the clique that had refused to give their best for Ewing. Now, as the fresh-faced Mathewson arrived, much of the other half of the team quit on Davis.

Freedman himself was the most hated man in the sport, a distinction he had labored hard to achieve. Bill James, the baseball historian, refers to Freedman as “George Steinbrenner on quaaludes, with a touch of Al Capone.” Nobody could work for him. Davis was his fifteenth manager in six years. Hardly any
“cranks” (as fans were called till about this time) would travel up to Harlem to see Freedman's team play. Attendance at the Polo Grounds was usually referred to as a “handful.” After being on the road for two weeks, only eight hundred showed up to see the team play its first game back, with Mathewson on the roster. The
Tribune
found even those sorts of numbers startling, calling Giant supporters “hoodwinked.” So the paper's baseball reporter offered some explanation: “Many strangers find themselves in New-York every day and some of them continue to wander up to this mismanaged institution at the Polo Grounds [where Boss] Croker unearthed 'Andy' Freedman and permitted him to get the fingers of the strangler upon the throat of professional baseball” in New York.

Welcome to the big time, Mr. Mathewson.

On July 16, the day before his debut on the mound (or the “pitcher's box,” as it was more commonly referred to), when the Giants played Brooklyn, Mathewson even got to enjoy his first baseball riot. Although the
World
was not impressed by the imbroglio, calling it “a touch of farce-comedy,” it had seemed sufficiently threatening for twenty-three of New York's finest to have been called to the ballyard to protect the umpire. After all, “Dirty Jack” Doyle had been released from the St. Louis hoosegow, and you couldn't be too sure. Then, the very next day, Mathewson got shelled in his debut, where upon who should come to town but the St. Louis Cardinals. For reasons lost to antiquity, the New York sports writers enjoyed referring to the Redbird aviary as “the Terrors.” Well, perhaps it was all because of their bellicose third baseman, the luminous Mr. McGraw.

Ah, there one can imagine young Christy Mathewson before the game, sneaking a peek at McGraw as he came out onto the field to warm up. He may not have been easy to spot right away. Whereas Mathewson himself was a towering six-feet-two, McGraw was only five-feet, six-and-a-half inches tall; not for nothing would he be known as “The Little Napoleon.” He was
pasty-faced, too, with light blue eyes—“slitty little cold, gray eyes” someone who disliked him thought—but as a young man he offered up almost a sweet countenance in repose. He wore his coiffure fashionably swirled on the sides in what was known then as the “fishhook effect.” Not to put too fine an Irish point on it, but McGraw looked like a leprechaun without a conscience.

John J. McGraw, manager, New York Giants

Probably, as Matty eyed him, “Muggsy” was horsing around with Wilbert Robinson, “Uncle Robbie,” his pal and business partner from their days together in Baltimore. Still, if McGraw was hollering and razzing, as he usually was, Mathewson might not have heard him across the diamond. Muggsy didn't possess a foghorn. Rather, as his wife remembered: “John's voice was light and pitched rather high.” But, she added: “It was hairpin sharp.”

Mathewson, like so many young baseball players, held McGraw in awe. He had not only been one of the stars of the most glamorous team of the century, the Baltimore Orioles, but McGraw was both the soul and brains of that brazen outfit. A couple years before, as captain of his town team back in Pennsylvania, Mathewson had proudly used a stratagem that he had read that McGraw had dreamed up for the Orioles. “I worshiped him in those days,” Mathewson would write years later, “little thinking that I should ever know him; and it was beyond my fondest dreams that I should ever play ball for him.”

And here he was—the fabled “Muggsy” McGraw—coming out to take batting practice on the same diamond where Mathewson cowered to the side, eyeing him. McGraw was, by then, probably the most famous athlete in America, his renown the measure of James J. Jeffries, the heavyweight champ. His fame had grown all during the Gay Nineties as he led the Orioles to three championships. He was still only twenty-seven, but had already lived life full. Not only had he spent a decade playing in the majors, he had become a successful manager as well. He was, too, already widowed, and had barely escaped death himself from typhoid fever. He had played ball in Cuba—“El Mono Amarillo,” they called him with delight: “the Yellow Monkey”—and had traveled to England and the Continent in style. On the town, where he often sallied forth, McGraw favored shirts and shoes from Cuba to go with one of his blue serge suits that every gentleman then wore all year round. He and his buddy Robinson were prominent Baltimore citizens, owners of the famous Diamond Café, where
the sporting gentry of the Monumental City drank, ate, played billiards, and bowled midst handsome oak furnishings. Indeed, so successful was McGraw that when the Orioles franchise had been folded the year before, after the '99 season, he had pretty much called his own tune.

He deigned to go to St. Louis, with the portly Robinson—“his avoirdupois partner”—for only a one-year contract of ten thousand dollars, the highest in the game, and an unprecedented under-the-table arrangement that he and Uncle Robbie would not be bound by the game's reserve clause. That is, once the season was over, the two gentlemen proprietors of the Diamond Café would be free to sign with whomever they pleased. Some McGrawologists figured Muggsy must surely have been angling to take the St. Louis manager's job away from Oliver Wendell “Patsy” Tebeau, but McGraw laughed at that. In his own cockeyed scuffler's style, he explained: “Why, I had more scraps with Patsy than any other man. As a result, we were close friends.” No, after the 1900 sojourn in St. Louis, Muggsy wanted to return to some team on the East Coast—ideally to a newly constituted Baltimore nine.

McGraw was still a whale of a player. In '99, even as he had also managed Baltimore, McGraw had hit .391. With St. Louis, although he was just going through the motions, he batted .344 for the 1900 season, leading off and playing third. And so here is young Christy Mathewson, in his first week in the major leagues, eyeballing the famous McGraw's every move, and in the second inning—just the second inning!—Matty watches aghast as Muggsy throws a conniption fit.

Contemporary accounts don't explain what upset McGraw so. We only know that it was a decision at first base. He alone appears to have taken umbrage. Nobody could figure out why. “It was apparent that the decision was imminently correct,” the
Times
assured its readers. Umpire Terry finally had enough, though, and ejected McGraw, a dismissal, observed the
Tribune
,
“that seemed to dishearten the other members of the St. Louis team.” Indeed, with McGraw expelled, the Giants garnered a rare victory, beating the Terrors 8–3. Only then, in defeat, did the losers appear to come to life again “when they applied uncalled for verbal abuse to the umpire.”

So did Matty first encounter Muggsy. Probably, as he went back to his room at the Colonial Hotel on 125th Street, he wondered what possibly could have set McGraw off. But then, that's the sort of thing Mathewson might have pondered often for the rest of his baseball life. Sometimes Muggsy just blew his top because that's what Muggsy did. You never could be sure, though. Sometimes he would feign anger and get himself thrown out of a game early on so that he could go to the horse races. That might account for his actions on that particular Thursday, July 19, 1900. St. Louis was out of the pennant race, and the crowd at the Polo Grounds was a handful. The best umpires were on to his scam, though. One time in St. Louis when McGraw pretended to argue a call so vociferously as to get tossed so he could head over to the track, umpire Tim Hurst just smiled at him and said: “There ain't a chance, Mac.” No matter how vile and animated Muggsy got with Hurst, the ump just grinned back. McGraw's punishment was that he had to stay and play whether he liked it or not.

Anyway, two weeks after the Polo Grounds ejection, the Giants played in St. Louis. Matty had been rocked again in Pittsburgh the week before, giving up six runs in the first inning he worked in relief. Then, in St. Louis on Saturday, August 4, Mathewson actually pitched to McGraw. Although it's unclear from the box scores exactly when he relieved “Doughnut Bill” Carrick, he came on fairly early, and since McGraw got two hits in the game, at least one and maybe both came off the debutante. St. Louis won 9–8. If Mathewson had any consolation, he did get his first major league hit in this game, a triple. He was always a pretty fair-hitting pitcher.

But unfortunately in 1900 he wasn't much of a pitching pitcher. Manager Davis used him only three more times before
the parsimonious Freedman sent Mathewson back to Norfolk so that the owner might get a refund on the deal. On the year with the Giants, Mathewson had no wins but three losses, giving up thirty-four hits, twenty walks, and thirty-two runs in thirty-four innings pitched. He grew terribly homesick living alone at the Colonial Hotel, and on the road nobody in either of the team's two disputatious cliques seemed to have much time for the kid. By the end of the season Mathewson had decided that he was not good enough to make it in baseball. He considered a career in forestry or in the Presbyterian ministry, which is what his mother had in mind for him.

McGraw, too, could hardly wait for the '00 season to end. The Terrors finished tied for fifth, and as soon as the last game was played, McGraw and his advoirdupois partner were on the first train outta town, back to Baltimore, there again to greet their friends at the Diamond Café. As their railroad car crossed over the Mississippi River, Muggsy pulled down the window and he and Uncle Robbie chucked their St. Louis uniforms into the water. Already, McGraw had a pretty good idea of what other fish he would fry. By now he knew that there was going to be a second major league, titled the American, in 1901, and Baltimore was sure to get a franchise.

Meanwhile, Connie Mack, owner and manager of the new Philadelphia team in the upstart league, had heard good things about the debutante Mathewson and offered him a contract of fifteen hundred dollars. Mathewson, growing bold, asked for fifty dollars more, which Mack sent him as a cash advance. For now, forestry and preaching were put on the back burner. However, it would take a year and a half and considerable machinations more before Matty and Muggsy would be back on the field at the Polo Grounds, this time together, there soon to set the world on its ear.

Looking back from a vantage point of twenty-five years, the historian Mark Sullivan noted “some minor distinctive institutions” that were evident at the turn of the twentieth century in the United States of America. These included: “a national holiday known as Thanksgiving, rocking-chairs, a greater fastidiousness about personal cleanliness as measured by the commonness of bathtubs . . . ice-water, pie, New Engand boiled dinner, chewing gum.” There was a Ping-Pong craze on at that time, and croquet was still all the rage, but Sullivan chose to mention two other games. One was poker, “a diversion . . . indigenous to this nation and containing definite elements of the interplay of psychology not found in ordinary card games.” The other was: “baseball, a game calling for unusually quick reactions intellectually, and prompt and easy co-operation muscularly.”